Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Driving in Northern Ireland

Our very first day in Northern Ireland did not go off without a hitch. We landed in Belfast early in the morning and eagerly awaited Carol arriving from New York. After her arrival we headed to pick up the car that we would use to drive us around the Green Isle. I was to be the driver of our adventure and I thought we would have no issues. After all I had one brief lesson on driving on the left hand of the road with my housemate. I was a pro. Joking aside, I have driven manual transmission for a few years now so I feel myself to be pretty good at it. Well something about this car that we were picking up from the airport was hell bent on not letting me drive it.

Our excitement went from a 100 to 0 as I could not make it out of the parking lot. Giving up on the car, I abandoned my mother and sister and headed with Carol back into Belfast International Airport and back into the queue. The car rental guy was sure confused when we showed up again. After the set back of our time, we managed to get onto the road in our newly upgraded automatic Mercedes. Of course as I had been driving a manual in Canada for a million years, this automatic had a small learning curve but we got through it but not before I gave my family a bit of whiplash in the parking lot.

Our destination on our first day was Belfast, the Dark Hedges, Giant's Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge and finally to Sligo where we would spend the night. This was a very ambitious plan but it was made even worse by our delay of getting onto the road.

The photos from this post were from when we were stopped or taken by my sister as I was of course driving.